E-Trade is Down and Day Traders Are Freaking Out

Stock prices are flashed across a screen in the lobby of an E-Trade branch.Photo by Scott Olson — Getty Images

Day traders hoping to play the market using E-Trade Thursday morning found themselves scrambling for alternatives when the site suffered technical difficulties that prevented at least some users from making trades.

Users said they were unable to cover orders or execute any trades. The outage, which was ongoing as of late Thursday morning, is occurring at the same time that stocks are giving back recent gains. At 10:40 a.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was off 106 points.

A message posted to users on the site at 10:03 a.m. ET read, “We are currently experiencing technical difficulties and are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience.” The company has not acknowledged the issue on social media channels, though. And the system-wide notice apparently went out long after users began complaining about the issue.

On social media, many customers soundly rejected the apology.

@etrade Having issues and this unreliability is costing me money and trades! Have talked to customer service multiple times with no resolution! What is going on?! 😡

Once again I asked @etrade a while ago to send out a platform wide message that states they are AWARE of the ISSUE and are currently fixing it to make everyone realize there is an issue. They said they would, FAIL FAIL FAIL.